Run, Melos! (Part 1)

Original story by Dazai Osamu (1909-1948)

Heedless of his own impending death, Melos runs on to save his faithful friend Selinuntius, in this tale of unwavering friendship.

Meno Shirō was enraged. He resolved to do whatever he must to knock this wicked, tyrannical Director down a peg.

Meno was a slacker who spent his days lazing around at his filthy boarding house, flunking class after class. But vexingly, he was a man who felt the sting of injustice more keenly than most.

One afternoon, like a lion awakening from his slumber, Meno made a momentous decision. Maybe I ought to go to class for once, he thought. So he left his boarding house in Ichijōji and set off for campus. A chill, lonely wind brushed his cheeks as he walked along the tracks of the Eizan railway. It was deep in autumn. He didn’t have the faintest idea what lecture he would be attending, but in any case having resolved to let the moment take him where it would, he stepped onto campus, only to find it engulfed in a carnival mood. Unbeknownst to him, today marked the beginning of the campus festival, and as a result all classes were cancelled, leaving him with no way to satisfy his sudden burst of scholastic impetus. Meno pouted and licked a candy apple; kicked away a daruma that had rolled into his path; became aroused during a kiss scene at an independent film screening; viewed an odd avant-garde art installation entitled Elephant Butt; and ended up enjoying the festival much more than he had expected to.

After some time he thought to himself, I wonder how Serina is doing.

Meno had been fast friends with Serina Yūichi since he entered college. They were both members of the Sophistry Debate Society, each regarding the other with great respect. The Sophistry Debate Society was a penal colony composed of oddballs who, unconcerned with the scorn heaped upon them by society, willingly chose to walk the thorny path of spouting sophistry. But Meno and Serina stood head and shoulders above the rest, boasting, “Meno and Serina run this club!” The idiot duo were so incoherent in their ramblings that even their peers in this kooky assembly considered them unintelligible.

The two had not seen each other for a long time.

While Meno closeted himself in his room and spent his days plumbing the vast reaches of dreamland, Serina spent his time on campus exploring the far hinterlands of the course list, attending all sorts of peculiar lectures and telling anyone who would listen that he was taking Latin as his third foreign language.

Meno made his way through the refreshment booths lining the campus and toward the society’s clubroom, only to find a group of students huddled around a _kotatsu _erected on the path in front of the tightly locked door. Shivering shoulder-to-shoulder in the chilly autumn wind, and defiantly refusing (or simply unable) to join the campus festivities: these could only be the members of the Sophistry Debate Society. But Serina was not among them.

“Oh, look who decided to show up!”

“I thought you’d already dropped out.”

“What’ve you come to muck up this time?”

Seeing Menos, the members of the club welcomed him into the kotatsu.

Menos asked them, “Why have you set up a kotatsu here? Why aren’t you inside?”

His comrades’ faces clouded over as they poured him a drink.

“We’ve been locked out!”

They filled him in on the peril in which the Sophistry Debate Society now found itself.

The other day, a gang of burly men calling themselves the Cheery Bicycle Cleanup Corps had burst in, and expelled the society members from the room before they could so much as spout a single word of sophistry. The time-honored society plaque was ripped down and replaced with the plaque of the Raw Beancurd Skin Research Society. Naturally the debate society members were indignant at this outrageous treatment and attempted to resist. But their gutless leader quailed at the enormous might that lay at his fingertips and, with his hair falling out from the stress, fled over the Ōsaka no Seki checkpoint to Ōtsu.

“What sort of idiocy is this? Why don’t you fight back? This is no time to be burying yourselves beneath a toasty kotatsu!” Meno said angrily, but the society members just shrugged.

“If we resisted, we’d only be putting ourselves in danger. We’d be going up against the Director of the Library Police!”

“And who exactly is that?”

“You don’t know? How can you not know, after having been on this campus for so many years!”

Meno’s friends roundly castigated him for his ignorance.

The Library Police is a student organization founded for the purpose of punishing those who keep library materials past the due date, as well as retrieving said materials. However, in recent years the Library Police had begun to utilize the unique intelligence network it had spread around campus and environs to siphon up information on every single student, utilizing this clandestine power to expand its influence. At the apex of this organization was the Director, the true power behind the curtain, who used the Cheery Bicycle Cleanup Corps as his own Praetorian Guard to eliminate anything that did not suit his whims. Rumour had it that he bathed in pools of wine and feasted upon mountains of meat. Display even the tiniest hint of defiance, and every secret you ever had—your first crush, your embarrassing hobbies, the time you pocketed a bit of change during your shift at the co-op cafeteria, the time you begged your ex on hands and knees to take you back—would be posted on every bulletin board on campus for the world to see. The mere sight of him was enough to send tough guys running and crying for mummy.

“He’s a despot!” shuddered the society members.

Meno slapped the top of the kotatsu. “What a fellow, trampling on the private lives of others! Does he think he can get away with it? Even the most degenerate undergrad has a right to privacy!”

“The Director doesn’t trust a soul. He possesses the secrets of every student, on and off campus.”

“But why would he seize the clubroom? I don’t understand.”

“Apparently the Director’s first love has a weakness for raw tofu skin. He founded this research society in order to find out why. Apparently they picked our room to take over by lottery.”

“What an outrage! This cannot stand,” Meno erupted. “I shall speak with him directly.”

“Please, don’t do anything rash!” pleaded the society members, but Meno was beyond hearing.

Meno was a simple man.

Downing his cup, he stomped up to the locked door and set about tearing down the plaque of the Raw Tofu Skin Research Society. Seeing this, the remaining society members hastily fled the kotatsu, their last remaining bastion, and scattered far and wide.

Before long a group of brawny men came up and surrounded Meno.

“What are you doing?”

“Piss off!” Meno glared back at them, but in a moment he was whisked off his feet, and chanting “Hey! Ho!”, the men carried him off through the campus festivities.

Meno was brought to a dreary room on the top floor of the ancient building which housed the literature department. Two broad-chested men stood guarding the door.

Meno was sitting alone on a dusty sofa when a chubby man came huffing and puffing through the door.

“Oh, how hot it is,” he muttered to himself, rattling the window and trying to slide it open, but he was so clumsy that he found it difficult to manage. “It won’t open,” he mumbled, taking a short breather before returning to his labour. As Meno looked on, the man finally managed to pull it open, and retrieving a handkerchief from his pocket wiped his face before turning to glance sheepishly at Meno. “I am the Director of the Library Police,” he declared, in a shrill, unearthly voice. His skin was smooth and slick. “What were you planning to do with the plaque, eh? Speak!”

“I am going to rescue the Sophistry Debate Society from dissolution!”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible. That room is to become the headquarters of the Raw Tofu Skin Research Society.”

“I won’t let you have your way!” Meno burst out. “I have heard that you use the students’ secrets to bend them to your every whim. Perhaps the university president allows such lawlessness, but I will not!”

“I trust no one.”

“To doubt the heart of your fellow man is the most shameful depravity of all!”

The Director shook his head condescendingly.

“You understand nothing. It is my presence which maintains order on campus, and allows you filthy peasants to live in harmony. It is because I possess all of your secrets that those who would do evil dare not stir. The campus is at peace. You could not hope to understand how wearing it is to hold such responsibility!” He smiled sadly. “It is a lonely road, being a paragon of justice.”

“As if an oily slimeball like you would know anything about justice!”

“Shut up!” The Director’s face reddened, and spittle flew from his mouth. “Trust, love, friendship: speak what pretty words you like, but you could never understand the sorrow I bear. I, too, once trusted when I first stepped onto this campus. I was a bottomless fool who believed in love and friendship from the depths of my heart. But my friends were few… men looked down upon me, and women wouldn’t even look my way at all. Yet that troubled me but little. I still had someone I counted as my best friend, and one woman who was kind to me. I would have gone to any lengths for them, because I saw them as friends.”

Here the Director flushed crimson with the fury of his recollection. “Ah! And yet, they tossed me aside and began an illicit carnal relationship, all behind my back. They only ever intended to use me. From what I have heard, the bastard I once counted my friend even said, ‘He’s useful to keep around.’ When I found out, I lost both my best friend and my first love in one fell swoop. So I made up my mind: from then on, I would never trust a soul again, and live on through this hellish solitude! It is from that sorrowful decision that I have made it to where I am. It is because I trust no one that I have surpassed all others and become Director of the Library Police!”

“I feel like you’ve made some very poor decisions as a human being!”

“A simpleton like you could never understand!”

The two glowered at one other.

Finally, the Director wiped the sweat from his glistening face and smiled. “However...I suppose it must be cruel, losing your clubroom so suddenly. Allow me to make a proposal. If you truly wish to save the members of the Sophistry Debate Society, I am sure you will accept my terms.”

“Intriguing. Name them!”

“Tonight, to cap off the festivities, you will mount the stage which is being constructed on the campus grounds, and dance as an orchestra plays The Beautiful Blue Danube, clad only in your underpants!”

“Dance The Beautiful Blue Danube, in only my underpants! The disgrace! I had rather dance naked!”

“Say what you like,” smirked the Director. “But are you willing to dance for your friends?”

Meno drew himself up and stared down the Director. “Of course I will dance. But—” He paused for a moment and dropped his gaze to the floor. “But if you truly wish to show me compassion, I ask that you give me a day’s postponement. For you see, I must return to my hometown to attend my sister’s wedding. I swear to return by tomorrow evening, and dance in my underpants for the finale.”

“I suspected as much,” the Director sneered. “No doubt you have no intention of keeping your promise. Preserving your self-dignity means more to you than your friends. You ought to admit it. I will not be betrayed again!”

“You’re wrong!” Meno insisted earnestly. “I will fulfill my promise. Think about it. My big sister has finally found happiness. I have an obligation to celebrate her joy at her wedding. If you cannot bring yourself to trust me, then fine. I have a friend in the Sophistry Debate Society by the name of Serina. He has been a friend to me like no other since I entered college. Keep him here as a hostage. If I flee, have him dance in his underpants.”

Hearing this, the Director sank into thought.

This fellow seems sincere. Surely he will keep his promise, and prove that friendship yet lives. I have fallen into this hellish solitude, but if he keeps his promise, perhaps I will be able to trust again. Yes. Tomorrow evening, when he returns as he promised, I will greet him warmly with open arms, and absolve him of everything. And in doing so we will become friends. For the first time, I will have a friend in whom I can trust—

As these thoughts went through his mind, a faint ray of warmth seemed to shine on the cold, dead heart buried within his plump physique. In truth, the Director of the Library Police was thoroughly sick of this hellish solitude.

“Very well. Bring this man Serina here,” commanded the Director.

In a short time that peerless friend was brought into the room from the library, where he had been cramming Latin declensions into the folds of his grey matter. After Meno explained the whole situation, Serina nodded silently, his spectacles glinting. The two exchanged a firm handshake in that cold room. No more was needed between the two friends.

“Heed my words. If you run away, I will have your man dance in his underwear, and the Sophistry Debate Society will be disbanded. If you wish to avoid these things, prove to me this friendship of yours,” the Director commanded.

“See if I don’t!” Meno said, before sprinting out of the building. Beneath the clear, cold autumn sky, Meno dashed through the festivities and soon vanished into the distance.

Only the Director and Serina remained in the room. Serina sat on the sofa and crossed his long legs, regarding the Director coldly from behind his spectacles. The only sound in the still room was the soft burbling of the coffeemaker. The Director poured a cup and offered it to Serina. “All there is to do now is wait until tomorrow. Once he returns you will be freed. Just believe in the power of friendship, eh?”

“He’s not coming back.”

“Don’t be absurd. He promised. Once his sister’s marriage is done with, he will return.”

“He doesn’t have a sister,” Serina said haughtily.

The Director was struck dumb. Then he screwed up his face in fury. “You mean, he lied? He turned his devoted friend over as a hostage and simply ran away? What of friendship? What of love? What of fidelity?”

“I fear that I have no answers to give you.”

“REEEEEEEE!! How dare he! How dare he lie to me!” In his anger the Director trembled so violently that hot coffee spilled all over his hand. He let out a yelp, and furious at himself for embarrassing himself like this trembled even more uncontrollably. His paunch jiggled as he stalked around the room, spraying spit indiscriminately.

“He dares do this to me!? The Director of the storied Library Police does not know the meaning of impossible! I will find him, and force him to keep his promise, and then make him dance in a pair of underpants tomorrow night. And those underpants will be the most lurid shade of pink imaginable!”

Serina sat there calmly drinking coffee, unfazed by the Director’s display of anger. “I would not expect it to be easy, making my best friend fulfill his oath.”

Now let us turn our attention to said best friend.

Meno had dashed out of the campus, but there were really no pressing matters that he needed to attend to.

He boarded the Keihan train at Demachiyanagi Station and rode it down to Sanjō, though he didn’t have any particular goal in mind. The sun had not yet set. He crossed the Sanjō Bridge into the bustling city center, then dashed into a manga café and caught his breath. He wanted to read the latest installment of Fist of the North Star. In fact there was a mountain of other manga he wanted to read as well. “Come to think of it, I really do have a lot on my plate!” he murmured to no one in particular, and set about his task. As his eyes skimmed over the pages, he began to think that he might like to stay here for the rest of his life, eating potato crisps and reading every volume in this repository. And so he set out to do just that. Meno was a man who felt the sting of injustice more keenly than most, but he also tired of things more quickly than most.

He forgot to eat and sleep; forgot his fears for the future; forgot the sputtering out of his first love; forgot the peril which even now threatened the Sophistry Debate Society; forgot about his best friend, who would be forced to dance in his underwear should he not return by tomorrow evening; forgot about the passage of time.

When he looked up the hour hand on the clock had made a full rotation, and dawn was breaking.

Meno, who had sunken so deeply into his reading that the entire world looked as if it was in 2D, finally felt fatigue overtaking him. Putting down his book and began to doze off, but then he noticed that he was surrounded by several strange figures. They were the same four members of the Cheery Bicycle Cleanup Corps who had whisked him off to the Director the previous day. The Director had scoured his intel network to sniff out Meno’s whereabouts, and dispatched them to bring him in.

“You’re going to keep your promise,” they told him. The instant he heard these words, the long-since forgotten oath he had sworn sprang into his mind.

That Director is really trying to hold me to it, Meno realized. Though he had no intention whatsoever of keeping his promise, Meno put on a feigned show of indignant fury. “I put my best friend up as collateral, and yet you still don’t trust me! Your director is despicable! There’s still plenty of time left until evening!”

Putting them off their guard with a long, mocking yawn, he abruptly hightailed it out of there as fast as he could.

Sprinting out of the manga café he ran down Kawaramachi Street, and without a moment’s hesitation darted into an alley by the Kawaramachi OPA department store and threaded through the narrow back streets. Passing by the Kyōgoku Tōhō and Yachiyo-kan movie theaters he entered the Shinkyōgoku arcade. From behind he could hear the heavy footsteps of his brawny pursuers. If they lost Meno the wrath of the Director would fall upon them instead, and so they chased him as if their lives depended on it. Falling away one moment only to come up on his tail the next, Meno and his four pursuers knocked down unaware passersby, the white-hot pursuit proceeding south down the arcade beneath the midday sun.

Coming out onto Shijō Avenue, Meno darted down the stairs at the foot of a building into an underground passage.

Though you wouldn’t think it to look at him, Meno was the very picture of speed, pumping his lanky legs down the deserted corridor. When it came to love, or studies, or debts, he was always quick to abscond, if nothing else. He had spent his college days lazing around and letting his body atrophy, yet you would hardly think it to look at him now, sprinting past the Daimaru shop windows at astounding speed. The gap with his pursuers swiftly widened; two of them slammed into the thick pillars that lined the corridor and knocked themselves out cold. Feeling the pressure on their broad shoulders double, the remaining two huffed and puffed like bellows and ran on with looks of suffering.

As the corridor crossed from Kawaramachi into Karasuma, Meno spotted the ticket barriers of the Hankyū Karasuma Station in front of him. There were also stairs leading south to Shijō Station. Dawdling in Kyoto when the Director’s grasp was closing in on him would be the height of folly; the best thing to do was to get out of Kyoto and lie low until the heat had died down. While he was considering whether to head southbound on the Karasuma subway line, or to take the Hankyū to Umeda in Osaka, Meno recalled that a friend from his high school days lived in an apartment in Jūsō in Osaka.

Off he went then, towards Osaka.

Purchasing a ticket for the Hankyū he walked through the barriers, just in time to hear roars of frustration behind him. Paying them no attention he strolled down the stairs towards the platform. As luck would have it, an express train was just pulling in. Thanking his lucky stars, Meno exhaled through his nose triumphantly and boarded the maroon-coloured train, then sinking down deep into his seat finally let out a sigh of relief.

The train glided off. The next stop was at Katsura.

Passing Sai’in, the tracks emerged onto the surface, and the train car was flooded with white daylight. Meno screwed up his face. His eyes were bloodshot from reading manga late into the night, and he had an intense headache, probably in part because he had had nothing to eat. After grabbing a bite he would barge into his friend’s home, and then he would only have to wait until sundown for it all to be over.

Serina, I have no doubt you’ll make it through brilliantly! Meno thought to himself.

As he nodded off, Meno thought back to his first meeting with Serina.

The two had hardly been close friends when they first joined the Sophistry Debate Society. It was only after the historic struggle known as the War of the Underpants that each acknowledged the other as a worthy opponent.

The Chief Underpants War was a form of endurance training conducted by a certain university club. It was a simple, inhumane competition: whoever was able to wear a single pair of underpants the longest would earn the title of Chief Underpants. The prestige which was bestowed by this title was close to nil, and even if you won this pointless battle people would only snigger and point at you behind your back. But for some men, the unprofitability of it all lit a fire in their souls. Long after the rest of their society fellows had dropped out, Serina and Meno kept their fierce clash going, until the stench caused such an outcry that in the name of public interest the rest of the society declared it a tie. In the history of the Sophistry Debate Society there had never been a tie, not that anyone in particular was complaining, but Meno and Serina felt it must be fate.

This guy’s special, they each thought.

Whereas Menos was lackadaisical and prone to flights of fancy, Serina had a frighteningly keen intellect, as one might guess from the spectacles he wore. Meno was apt to fly into a passion, while Serina always remained cool and collected. The two seemed polar opposites, yet following the War of the Underpants, the two would often become infatuated with the most esoteric matters. When one began to let himself slip into the banal or mundane, the other would chastise him, and in this fashion the two built each other up on towards greater heights. This quest was all that linked them, this pursuit of things which everyone else thought utterly meaningless. Excepting the case of one particular woman they spurned relations of the flesh, and derived joy from meaningless training; by the older students they were mocked, by their classmates they were avoided, and by the younger students they were feared. And in time they came to boast of themselves: “Meno and Serina run this club!”

Meno reminisced fondly over those days with Serina as the train swayed over the tracks.

“I can’t afford to keep the promise. Doing something so mundane would be disrespectful to Serina. I must not let him down!”

So Meno’s resolve to escape only hardened.

At that moment, two men walked up to Meno.

As he looked up in surprise, the two grabbed one arm each and hauled him to his feet. Meno had thought he had lost them at Karasuma Station, but in fact they had managed to squeeze through just as the train doors were closing. “You’re not getting away!” they growled, still winded from the chase.

Mercy, Meno thought.

The train finally arrived at Katsura Station. The three debarked onto the platform.

The train back to Kawaramachi was on the other side of the tracks. Meno reluctantly ascended the stairs amidst the throng, sandwiched between the two brutes like a captured alien. The men’s hands were clamped as firmly as vises around his arms. In this fashion they approached the stairs that led down to the platform for the train to Kawaramachi. To Meno, that maroon train meant a one-way trip directly to a pair of pink underpants.

“I have to go to the bathroom!” he suddenly whimpered.

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re just trying to escape!”

“I can’t do it, I can’t hold it anymore. I’m going to wet myself. I’m going to piss my pants!”

Every person on the platform turned to stare at the brazen fellow sandwiched in between two other men who had just screamed in broad daylight that he was going to piss himself. Their looks were cold with disapproval, and even the station workers poked their heads out from the staff room to see what was going on. Brawny as they might be, even his captors quailed. Reluctantly they let him go to the bathroom, but once set loose Meno was not going to make it easy to capture him a second time.

After making a show of walking towards the ticket barrier Meno abruptly sprinted towards the Umeda platform. His guards ran after him, but having anticipated this Meno suddenly turned and ran back up the stairs. In their haste to grab him the guards lost their balance and tumbled down the stairs. Meno gave up on going back to Umeda and instead made for the Arashiyama-bound train. The guards woozily crawled back up the stairs, but by the time they realized which way he had gone it was too late. As they stood on the platform shaking their fists at the departing train, Meno looked through the window and stuck his tongue out at them.

The train was filled with tourists on their way to see the autumn leaves.

The rain of the past few days had let up, and the boundless autumn sky was as clear as if it had been washed clean. The peak of the season was behind them, but Meno assumed that the leaves still looked beautiful against the blue sky. Though he hadn’t exactly planned on going on this impromptu leaf viewing excursion, even the Director’s grasp didn’t reach all the way to Arashiyama, or so he naively thought.